Pouring concrete is good sweaty work. At the end of a day, a body knows it has been used, and a trail of hardening ground has been left to show for it.
David Shaw grew up pouring concrete in Ohio and was fine with the notion that he’d spend his life doing construction. He always played music, but when he went to college, he studied construction management and kept his singing and songwriting off to the side. It was a hobby.
Then not long after graduating college, in 2006, he entered a statewide radio contest and won. Suddenly it occurred to him this music thing might be more than a hobby.
“I wasn’t super serious about it, then I won that contest, and it was like out of 300 people all over Ohio – it gave me a little kick in the butt,” Shaw said. “Like, ‘Hey, maybe you ought to pursue something in music a little more than you are.’ Then I moved to New Orleans, and the rest is history.”
Shaw now leads The Revivalists, one of the hottest young bands emerging from the considerable musical entity that is the Crescent City. The Revivalists earlier this month were given the honor of kicking off the prestigious New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, and the band has been heralded in the national press as a breakout act likely to bring its Big Easy-infused blend of rock n’ roll and spiced-up soul to ever-bigger stages.
As The Revivalists prepare for a national tour, Shaw is taking a brief detour for a solo show at Café Boogaloo in Hermosa Beach Tuesday night.
“I don’t do too many of these solo things – I don’t really have time anymore, honestly – but any chance I get to do it, I take,” Shaw said. “Basically, our songs – I write ‘em on guitar, so the audience gets to hear ‘em in infant form.”
The Revivalists are powered in no small part by Shaw’s stage presence. He is a long tall sinewy soul singer and guitarist, but in a sense, he is also still pouring concrete – he comes from the Springsteen school of rock n’ roll, where every last ounce of sweat and soul is poured out and left on the stage.
“I’ve done my work for the day in one-and-a-half or two hours, like, ‘Okay, I’ve spent myself for that time,’” Shaw said. “It’s a workout, being up there, and I’m having a lot of fun doing it.”
He’s also a soul singer in that he pours every ounce of his life into his songs. And like Springsteen, or Otis Redding, or Louisiana legend Tab Benoit, Shaw is able to lift even sad songs into somehow joyous realms just by their having been so soundly sung. The Revivalists, ultimately, are about paving a way for a soulful redemption through song.
“It’s definitely soul with a little tinge of rock n’ roll,” Shaw said of his songwriting. “I don’t want to sound holier-than-thou, but it all comes pretty much straight from the soul, from reality. My writing is 90 percent an open diary of my life – that is what it is.”
David Shaw plays Café Boogaloo Tuesday night. 8:30 p.m. No Cover.
